One of the distinctive features of schooling in England and Whales had been its stratified nature: parents may pay to send their children to "public" (i.e. private) schools, or use state-provided schooling which in turn has been divided in the past into areas where schools select by an ability...

This paper reviews previous research on Irish unemployment. It examines the reasons for the persistence of high unemployment and the relevence of the concept of a time-varying rate of "equilibrium" unemployment in a small labour market. The links between Irish and British unemployment, and the...

This paper examines the role of employer provided health insurance in the retirement decisions of dual working couples. The near elderly have high-expected medical expenditures; therefore, availability of health insurance is an important factor in their retirement decisions. We determine if...

It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market However it not clear whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the worker...

It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market However it not clear whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the worker...

A monopsony model of the labour market is developed where wages and the effort level are chosen by the firm. Higher wages raise labour supply while higher effort reduces it. Wages will be below the socially optimal level while effort will be too high. Under a sufficient condition which is...

Bhaskar and To (1999) develop a model of monopsonistic competition and solve explicitly for equilibrium. While a minimum wage set just above the unconstrained optimum leads firms to increase employment it also causes firm exit as profits fall. In this note I show that the employment and welfare...

We extend the standard human capital earnings function to include dispersion in the return to schooling by treating the return as a random coefficient. If the rapid expansion in participation in higher education has been brought about by dipping further into the ability distribution, we should...

We apply a new estimator to the measurement of the economic returns to education. We control for endogenous education, unobserved ability and measurement error using only the natural heteroscedasticty of wages and education attainment. Our prefered estimate, 6.07%, is closer to the OLS estimate...